A New Method for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Treatment of Learning Difficulties

Abstract

ANY PSYCHOLOGY clinic which offers spec ial treatment services is faced with the problem of e valuating the effectiveness of these services. The staff of the UCLA Psychology Clinic School has felt this responsibility keenly. In this school, special techniques are used in a remedial program designed to help pupils of average or superior intelligence overcome serious learning difficulties?difficulties which have resulted in severe retardation i n basic school skills. Investigators who have attempted to evaluate the success of other programs with similar goals have typically used one of three conventional methods o f appraisal: a) the follow-up type of study in which the ? attempt is made to ascertain pupil competence in a regular school placement at some specified time af| ter treatment, b) the control-experimental group comparison type of study in which the improvement made by a treatment group is compared with that of a matched group of non-treated subjects, and c) the achievement method in which a c h i e vement scores before treatment are compared with achie vement scores after treatment. None of these methods has proven entirely satis factory. The first method suffers from the practi cal difficulty of keeping track of numbers of subjects over sustained time periods and of determining the influence of experiences intervening between time of termination of treatment and time at which fol low-up is undertaken. The second method denies needed services to children in order that they may serve as control subjects; the third method does not take into account individual differences in the sever ity of initial disability, e. g. , the relative gain made by a subject suffering from severe learning disa bility may be much greater than the gain made by a less handicapped subject, even though each of them makes the same objective gain in achievement test scores. The method proposed in this paper avoids these difficulties while at the same time it yields a more meaningful measure of individual achievement.